Displaced

I look down at the pavement,
Washed by the winter’s rain,
Water puddles reflecting faster clouds flying over my head.
It’s not my face I see floating inside it,
It’s the face of a stranger.

She has been taken away from the land,
Where she first learned her name;
Where she first bled and became a woman.
Where she first sowed her seeds
And watched them sprout towards the sun.
The same place where her roots grew downwards,
Reaching the centre of the earth,
Giving her strength and wisdom,
Just to find out that she didn’t belong.

She was not welcome there.
Not there, not here
Not anymore

She walked endless roads,
Within herself, endless paths…
Trying to find a place to be
Away from the shadows
She was hiding from.
She kept moving on,
Even when she did not know where she was going.

From time to time her eyes would peep from behind the dark curtains.
Acid rain fell over her eyelids, burning them.
It ran down her cheeks, like an old scar, touching the tip of her tongue.
(She remembered that taste.)

Displaced

It was the same rain that washed her body in the rivers of her birth place.
The sky isn’t blue painted with burning golden ashes,
But, it is the same sky that lies over every man and woman,
It is the same sky that once shaded her dreams.

The wind came playing around her face,
Bringing smells of spices and fields of wild flowers,
Reminding her once again of a faraway land.
It is the same wind that dances in the desert lifting yellow dust,
It plays around shells resting over the white sanded shores,
It gallops across the mountains kissing silver clouds,
It is the same wind that visits birds of paradise nesting in the canopies of tropical rainforests,
Now, it also dances here between concrete jungles, and around her feet.

She was the one reflected on the water puddle,
Standing up above all her fears and doubts,
But, light hides under colourless shadows,
In the same places where rainbows are born and colours play side by side.

She smiled and kept moving on.
She stepped out of the puddle.
This time it’s my face I saw reflecting inside it.